Our Anniversary Trip To Snowflake, Arizona

As most of you from my groups know, Robert and I went away for the week to celebrate our 20^th anniversary and my birthday. Our plans were to stay at our Moon Rock property in Snowflake, Arizona and use it as a central point as we explored the area around us each day. The weather ended up being pretty windy, cold, and nasty so we were cabin bound for the most part.

On our way in, we were greeted by this beautiful collared lizard. He stuck around long enough to get quite a few shots of him.

Pretty soon another lizard came by and he must have been from an adjoining 40 acres because our lizard didn’t like him one bit. They started fighting and the skies opened up with thunder and lightning. The world became foggy and the invading lizard fought for his very life as our lizard tore him from limb to limb in an effort to protect what was his.

Just kidding! That picture was from the Petrified Forest. I’ll do another photo essay later about that little side trip.

I did get a few pictures of the peaceful birds on the property.

I even managed to find another lizard, a squirrel, and a cottontail rabbit.

Then I found a snake. It’s a good thing I pay attention to where I’m walking most of the time. Whew! I’m not afraid of snakes at all but I don’t know much about them so I called Robert on the cell phone and told him where I was and to come and check this guy out. Robert works out in the wilderness and runs into rattlesnakes all the time so he doesn’t have very much love for them. He came whipping around the boulders on his green steed, packing a bb gun, beer in the cooler, ready to defend me! LOL.

This is actually just a bull snake and nothing to worry about; in fact, I love having him around to help with the vermin population. He was lying in between the boulders, out of the wind, sunning himself, and catching a little shuteye. He was very calm and never became agitated with us being there. The way he was lying under the branch made me think that there might be two different snakes there and that’s actually why I had called Robert.

When he did become a little annoyed with us he just slithered off under his rock in the shade.

After leaving the snake I was climbing through the boulders on my way down when I noticed this in one of the rocks. This could possibly be a metate (grinding stone). Wouldn’t that be cool? I’ll have to explore that area a little further later on. I scraped the dirt out with my shoe so I could see the depth of it.

Each day the wind would start up and would whip through the property and all around us. The wind was so strong that it blew the feathers right off the birds! Ha! When we looked over the horizon we saw a huge wall of black that was dirt and sand blowing all over the valley below. The winds can be bad at the property at times but this is the worst I have ever seen it.

One night we even got snow and it froze all the water we had sitting outside.

About every other day the weather was at least tolerable so I did manage to get a few shots of the property.

On our way home we stopped in an area near Aripine where there were a lot of dirt roads to run our quads on. We didn’t stay long but decided we would have to bring our friends up here to go quadding for a day. The area is beautiful and we even found an old cabin we might have to investigate.

We had a great time celebrating our anniversary and my birthday but we’re also glad to be back home to showers, a nice bed, and our pets.